


Five Facts About Goodnight Robicheaux and One About Billy Rocks

by Caora (Soujin)



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 19:21:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8222074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soujin/pseuds/Caora
Summary: Billy sits him down on the side of the bed and starts to undress him, hands so gentle that it's hard to believe how good they are at death. He works slow and methodical. In a quick-draw he's like the flare of a match, spark and then fire, but now he's taking his time, unbuttoning Goody's waistcoat, getting him down to shirtsleeves."Puritan," Goody says."Someone had to carry you back."





	

i.

He is a liar. If the devil is in the details, then the devil and Goody Robicheaux make each other's acquaintance on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

Lying is an art predicated on bravado, and he has that in spades. It's so easy to slip into the uniform of charming erudite Southern gentleman, a grey uniform that he wears like his father and brothers before him, and even smoke and bloodstained it suits him. Anyone can see it suits him. Women allow themselves to be flattered by his drawl; men permit themselves to be ordered. Those that are afraid of his reputation permit more.

Billy is indifferent to his lying; perhaps that is the second thing that compelled him about Billy. The first thing that compelled him was watching Billy take down five men in the space of a sip of whiskey, a feat that Goody has spun into gold many times: five men, ten men, twenty-five, the entire bar, quick as a breath, quick as a shot, smooth as a North Carolina accent. Billy's lips quirk when Goody tells stories about him.

In bed, in darkness, sitting astride Goody's thin hips, he says, "Thirty this time? I don't have thirty knives."

"You retrieved them. Expeditiously." Goody licks his dry lips. Billy's patience is excruciating, how he can wait for release as long as it suits him, the heat of him radiating onto Goody's body like a sun. Where Goody is always cold, Billy is always warm.

"Did I?" he murmurs, his dark hair slipping past his ear, shadowing his already shadowed face.

"You're capable of acting quickly, or so I've heard, Jesus, Billy!" as that warm hand closes around his cock.

"Hmm," Billy says, unmoved.

In the morning the hotel's manager asks how they found everything.

"Everything was excellent," Goody assures him, his weathered smile pulling the corners of his mouth up -- a smile that wins nearly everyone. Sure enough, the manager smiles back.

"You slept well?"

"Superbly."

Billy's expression doesn't change, but Goody gets the sense of him laughing anyway.

ii.

He's a romantic.

There's absolutely no surprise in it. What else to expect from a man who grew up on one of those white-columned plantations, drinking through the sticky heat of summer and nearly every other season? What else to expect from a man who was surrounded by agony but never felt the touch of it?

There are days he wonders how he could ever have considered men to be the window-dressing of life, fixtures like furniture, their living and dying irrelevant to the people in the big house. It's not that he's changed so much in his thinking, but masters enough sent their slaves to die in their places, and those that died died often enough in his presence, ingloriously, as death comes in war. He saw humanity in that inhumanity and he has had enough time to catalogue his regrets.

These are things he says to Billy when he's drunk, drunk enough to be voluble and vulnerable, and Billy listens quietly. Billy hears more than he says, which is proverbial in its virtue.

There are grand gestures he would have made towards the woman he married that he cannot make towards Billy. There are gifts of clothes and property, but Billy has everything he needs. There are love letters fashionable in their expressive prose, but Billy reads English poorly, and paper is scarce.

On numerous occasions Goody has debated the merits of leaving a flower on Billy's bedroll, or buying some discreet piece of jewelry.

"I have everything I need," Billy says, echoing his thoughts, on the rare occasion when Goody presses him.

"It doesn't particularly have to be something you _need_."

Billy gives him a look, eyebrows raised. "Rolling papers."

"A triviality."

"Sunday pair of boots," his lips quirking.

"Heathen." Goody taps a finger on his holster in annoyance, which only makes Billy's mouth twitch a little more. Jesus Christ, his mouth is beautiful.

Romance simply doesn't come organically to Billy Rocks, but he doesn't protest the expensive bottle of Tennessee bourbon that appears in his personal effects, tied off with a bit of black ribbon.

He does insist on sharing, which almost seems to defeat the purpose.

iii.

He's always afraid.

Even on the rare occasions when the past isn't breathing hotly down his neck, there's something else to take over for it.

Billy licks the rolling paper, then passes him the cigarette; Goody's fingers are shaking as he brings it to his lips. He woke them both by sitting bolt upright by the dying embers of their fire, swearing and trembling, facing down Union artillery and smelling blood, smoke, urine, death, his eyes fixed on nothing.

It happens often enough that neither of them says a thing.

Billy slipped out of his bedroll and held Goody down, the solid pressure of his body squeezing the panic out of Goody's lungs like smoke. His slim hand stroked Goody's chest, up, down, firm, real. True.

When Goody could breathe again they sat up, Billy banked the fire, made up a cigarette. He's still sitting close, his shoulder pressed to Goody's, real, true.

This isn't to say Goody's never mistaken him for someone else, in the delirium of fear. Sometimes Billy looks like another man (always someone dead), and sometimes he's shadowed by smoke and the specter of death, and sometimes he's on fire, burning alive, and Goody is screaming, shot himself or maybe just cowardly, unable to protect him or flee him or flee _this_ \--

If it hurts Billy to be the thing that frightens Goody sometimes, or at least to look like it, he never shows it. He just follows the pattern: pressure, touch, patience, cigarette. They share the cigarette.

They both know Goody is running, moving across the stretch of the West with a lope that's Southern in its gradual pace. Can't run breakneck. That's not dignified. As if dignity is in the forefront when he's hallucinating and Billy has to argue with senselessness, trying to talk him out of battlefields filled with owl-soldiers and their bayonets.

After the cigarette is burned down to a stub, Billy fucks him.

He always wants it hard, real, true, the blunt force of Billy's body hitting him with every thrust. This is something that has never been part of any life before Billy: it's the present. No one else has touched him in this way. No one else has used him like this. It can only be now.

Billy bites his bottom lip when he's fucking Goody, concentrating on him. His hair always falls loose and gets in his face. He's mythological, beautiful, his hands grip Goody's shoulders and the sweat shining on his chest and neck is like the shine of church silver, he's religion, he's a prayerbook, Goody reads the psalms out in the fingerprint bruises he leaves behind. He's real. He's good. He's safe.

He's safe.

Always, in afterglow, when they lie panting together on the blanket, Goody tries to hold onto that safety. It's like fireflies, here and then there and then gone. Sometimes for a few moments he catches it between his cupped hands, and listens to Billy's breathing slow to normal.

iv.

He's running out of distance.

Billy watches impassively as he drinks himself further down, as if putting an ocean between himself and Antietam is possible. Billy is so inscrutable in public that he almost seems indifferent, and some nights that indifference gnaws at Goody, like starvation, like picking through the pockets of dead men laid out in fields, like stumbling on a horse's corpse in a fog-filled ditch and fighting off crows for a chance at it.

When he's drunk enough to fall on his ass trying to get back to the bar, Billy intercedes. His arm slides around Goody's back as he gets him back to his feet, and then he's steering him towards stairs, off towards a room somewhere that Goody booked back when he was sober.

Billy sits him down on the side of the bed and starts to undress him, hands so gentle that it's hard to believe how good they are at death. He works slow and methodical. In a quick-draw he's like the flare of a match, spark and then fire, but now he's taking his time, unbuttoning Goody's waistcoat, getting him down to shirtsleeves.

"Puritan," Goody says.

"Someone had to carry you back."

"Should I make it worth your time?" He leers, but Billy looks up at him quietly. Those dark eyes are gentle, and Goody swallows down disgust. Billy drops down to his knees and works off Goody's boots. "Silence?"

Billy shrugs.

"Like patience on a monument. Cesario, you've betrayed me."

Billy's chin comes up, a flicker of annoyance -- finally! -- in his eyes. "Pants," he says shortly.

Obedient as a puppy, Goody sits up enough for Billy to tug his pants over his hips. Before he can come up with another retort, Billy adds, "Bed."

"Don't order me around."

Billy's hand catches his chin, fingers pressed against his beard, thumb at the corner of his mouth, the calloused pad of it almost between his lips. "Go to bed."

All the liquor in the world doesn't keep him from dreaming anyway.

v.

Without Billy, he has nothing.

It's plausible enough that he would have continued limping through the Western Territories until he was either shot or broke his neck falling drunk off his horse. It's certainly not absurd to suggest he would still be _alive_ in a purely literal sense.

But Billy has been less a Cesario than a Horatio, propping up the heartsick death-hunting prince, shielding him from the consequences of madness. Goody feels a great deal in common with Hamlet -- rumination, for one, and volubility for another, and of course idiocy and insanity. Billy is the heart's-friend who has come from afar to stand at his elbow and try to save him.

He expects to die in spite of Billy's best efforts, whether by poisoned foil or poisoned wine or letter to England or his own hand. But Billy, somehow, seems to have faith in him.

"That was a sufficiency of ill-gotten gains," he says, as he finishes counting out the money from the quick-draw, and Billy glances up at him with that half-smile.

"Ill-gotten?"

"I beg your pardon."

"You should."

"I'll make amends by buying you a drink tonight."

" _A_ drink?"

Goody laughs, satisfaction easing the tension in his shoulders when Billy laughs too. "Do you deserve more than one?"

"You're my manager."

"An excellent point." He stacks coins. "A drink and I'll clean your pistol."

Billy laughs again, leaning back in his chair. "Spit-shine?" He starts to roll out a cigarette.

"Naturally."

Good as his word, he sucks Billy's cock after supper, when they're both a little liquored up -- just enough to keep Goody relaxed, not too much to forget by morning. There are infinite numbers of things he doesn't want to remember, but this isn't one.

Billy's gloved hands sink into his hair and tug as his tongue circles the head of Billy's cock. Billy's always quiet, in this as in everything else, but Goody has other ways of knowing whether or not he's pleased. The tension in his hips, the way his eyes close, lashes standing out against his cheeks; his thumb stroking at Goody's temple, slow and in circles, until he gets close and everything becomes still and taut, waiting. Goody waits until he's finished and then swallows, because he's a gentleman.

Then they play cards, more or less naked, sprawled on the bed. There's domesticity in this. There's comfort. The two of them doing what they always do. He pretends that he's not itching at the thought that there's someone waiting for him, outside the door or window, huddling in shadows, and Billy says nothing about anything, just brushes his hand or arm on purpose as he deals.

In the morning, they ride.

vi.

Billy Rocks knows where and when he'll die, and that's where and when Goodnight Robicheaux dies. Lately that's seemed closer and closer.

In the meantime he wakes Goody from dreams, shoots for him, lies for him, guides him home, shares cigarettes with him, and waits.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Five Facts About Goodnight Robicheaux and One About Billy Rocks](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11232819) by [decoy_ocelot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/decoy_ocelot/pseuds/decoy_ocelot)




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